July 11 (Bloomberg) -- There is something extremely British
about marking the beginning of an era with a political sex
scandal.

These are of course a national specialty, going back at
least to the late Georgian days of the Prince Regent, with his
mistress in Brighton and epically unfaithful royal bride.

There was something unusual about the Profumo affair, which
made headlines half a century ago. No other such brouhaha has
ever been seen as a watershed: the beginning of the end of
political deference.

True, the Brits had little enough of that in the 18th and
19th centuries, so it must have been a short-lived phenomenon.
Still, the argument runs, when John Profumo, the U.K.’s
secretary of state for war, stood up in the House of Commons and
lied about his relationship with the model Christine Keeler,
something began to change.

Before, the public had tended automatically to believe
politicians, afterward not so much.

The other thing that began then, at least according to
historical myth, was sex. The poet Philip Larkin famously wrote
that “sexual Intercourse began in 1963.”

Admittedly, his two pivotal items were the end of the ban
on publishing D.H. Lawrence’s novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”
because of its alleged obscenity, and the Beatles’ first LP.

Larkin might just as well have added the great scandal of
the year. The Beatles had much more cultural importance, the
Chatterley verdict transformed what might be described in
literature. Of the three, the Profumo case had by far the most
drama and -- importantly -- visual impact.

Cold War

This imbroglio had everything: a cabinet minister, a
reputed Russian spy who also had an affair with Keeler (giving a
John Le Carre touch to the tale), a fashionable doctor and
Keeler herself: a beautiful young woman with connections to
seedy gangland criminals. It sounds like the cast of a Cold War
era film (and indeed has been the basis for several movies and
plays).

This photograph, on show in a display about the Profumo
affair at the National Portrait Gallery, sums up 1960s London:
sensuous, enigmatic, and stylishly contemporary. In a way, the
chair was just as important as the nude.

It was, it turns out, not quite a design classic, but a
commercial “knock off” of a design by the celebrated Danish
architect, Arne Jacobsen. Genuine or not, it was the chair that
made the photograph so cool.

Immortal Click

The allure of the image, in turn, makes the whole archaic
shenanigans memorable. What we cannot visualize, we cannot
easily bring to mind. This is one reason why Henry VIII, for
example, is such a famous king: he was rendered unforgettable by
Holbein’s pictures. Similarly, Keeler was made immortal by the
click of Lewis Morley’s shutter.

There was one other artistic consequence of the photograph.
It became the centerpiece of a lost painting by a beautiful,
doomed artist named Pauline Boty.

A member of the same generation of artists at the Royal
College of Art as David Hockney and Allen Jones, Boty (1938 -
1966) was enormously talented and beautiful (she was known as
the “Wimbledon Bardot”). She was 28 years old when she died of
cancer.

Her Profumo painting, “Scandal ’63” has not been seen
since then. It was however recorded together with the artist
herself in photographs by Michael Ward. These, which are
included in the display at the National Portrait Gallery, are in
their way as evocative of 1960s London as the Profumo affair
itself, and more poignant.

“Scandal ’63: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Profumo
Affair” is in Room 32 at the National Portrait Gallery, London,
until Sept. 15.

“Stephen Ward,” a musical based on the Profumo scandal with
music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Christopher Hampton
and Don Black, will preview at the Aldwych Theatre in London
from Dec. 3 2013.

(Martin Gayford is chief art critic for Muse, the arts and
leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are
his own.)

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